This week’s food fiasco will be a three-way bagel blitz between Au Bon Pain, WAC’s very own Cage and the Boilerhouse Cafe. What’s that you say? A bagel is a bagel? Well that simply isn’t so. There’s nothing boring about these dough rings!
Au Bon Pain
Photos by Tom Miller
Once again ABP — just as they did with the salad showdown — set a pretty high standard. For just $2.60 I was able to get a bagel and an absolutely sinful container of herbed cream cheese. Certainly good for a midday energy boost, the bagel weighed in at 200 calories while the cream cheese added another 100. While it did seem that they offered other types of bagels beside the plain that I was able to snag, they appeared to be out of the other varieties.
This bagel marked up with some of the greats: it clearly had a beautiful boil on it, allowing for the thick chewy bagel crust that any bagel connoisseur has come to expect, while the inside remained fluffy and dense at the same time. I cannot praise this cream cheese spread enough either, loaded with black pepper, parsley and chives this was an absolute pleasure to eat while I studied in Oesterle. I’m confident in saying that at this price point (and with that spread) this bagel receives five swipes out of five.
The Cage
While the Cage’s bagel clocked in at only $1.63, albeit with an undisclosed calorie count, it seems that the extra 97 cents is well worth the upgrade to ABP or the extra dollar for Boho. The Cage did offer to toast my bagel, however, an offer I did not receive at ABP; I happily obliged. Served on a polystyrene plate with a small container of one-third fat cream cheese (which again was missing a calorie count), I realized something: this bagel lacked a hole! Surely you cannot just go around calling any boiled-then-baked dough product a bagel if it lacks a hole.
In sum, this bagel was “meh.” It tasted… decent. The toasting was uneven and while one side of the bagel seemed damp, the other seemed to be stale (truly a feat to behold). The one-third fat cream cheese was well… one-third fat cream cheese, no fancy shmancy herbs or anything (but hey, that’s fine sometimes). This is what the nay-sayers are thinking of when they say all bagels are the same! Sorry to break it to you, Cage, but you’ve gotta step your bagel game up if you want to keep people coming back; two-and-a-half out of five swipes — completely average.
Boilerhouse (Big Apple)
The bagels at Boho come from Big Apple Bagels. This is a good sign after being let down with The Cage’s bagel. For $2.63 I stuck with the theme from the previous two and got a plain bagel. I was then informed that Boho now had three (the cashier was very excited about this) cream cheese flavors — Boho is looking good. After a quick nutrition checkup on Big Apple Bagel’s website, I found that the bagel had 334 calories. I opted for the mini-sized Philadelphia vegetable-flavored cream cheese (this was the cashier’s favorite), which did not have calories listed on the packaging.
Costing 3 cents more than the ABP bagel and an even dollar more than the Cage’s bagel, Boho’s bagel measured up right about where I’d expect. It didn’t taste 3 cents better than ABP’s, but it was certainly at least a dollar better than the Cage’s. This bagel was the midpoint between the two and clearly on the higher end. Fresh out of a sealed package, this bagel was guaranteed to be soft — and soft it was. The Philadelphia vegetable-flavored cream cheese was also at the perfect midpoint between the previous to spreads: definitely better than the Cage’s and a bit lower on the ladder than ABP’s: nothing exceedingly great but certainly better than one-third fat plain cream cheese. My only complaint for Boho’s bagel is that it seemed too porous, a bagel this holey does not foster an even spread of cream cheese. While it doesn’t make sense to me that this should cost more than ABP’s bagel I am happy to award the bagel from Boilerhouse four out of five swipes (it’s only 3 cents).
